welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Monday, May 15, 2006

yet another google-based timesuck

Google Trends allows you to enter search terms and compare the frequency with which they have been entered into Google by the population over time. You can select an option to restrict the graphs to only searches within the United States. (The letters and flags in the graph refer to news stories based on the term in the sidebar that add little information and, annoyingly, cannot be turned off.)

In the US, searches including "football" exceed those including "porn" for most of the pro and college regular season, while those for "basketball" only exceed "porn" during March Madness, and those in "baseball" never exceed "porn."

I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the timing of the annual spikes in searches for these terms. Note that the second annual peak for "flowers" is higher than the first.* Consider also what the difference in the duration of spikes suggests about the advance thought given to the different things.

* Comparison of searches for "flowers" and "lingerie" show a spike for "lingerie" that coincides with the first peak for "flowers" and not the second, which I think is probably a good thing for society.

11 comments:

It also looks like that first flower spike barely got a lingerie blip in 2005, and it still hadn't bounced back to 2004 levels this year. This is exacerbated by restraining the graph to US searches only, so if people are switching to candy or something, they're mainly doing it here. Nation of puritans, I tell you.

RWS, there may be hope. I would bet that porn-seeking people don't necessarily use the search term "porn," but instead, use words like "free thumbnails" or "free streaming video." Of course, this is an empirical question. But I bet if you compiled all of those terms together, it'd make quite a spike.